Ever since 1980s, much research has been done investigating the writing processes of L 2 writers of different ages and abilities. Despite the abundance in such a research, there seems to be a dearth of studies on comparing the writing proficiency of both Arabic and Spanish speakers narrating in English. Motivated by such a huge research gap, this study was undertaken to answer the following questions: (1) The subjects were ten foreign graduate students at the University of Pittsburgh, USA. They belonged to two different linguistic and cultural backgrounds. The first was from the Arabic language group, and the second was from the Spanish linguistic group. The data were taken from (1) a questionnaire; (2) writing a narrative text, and (3) individual interviews. The data were analyzed both qualitatively and quantitatively. The linguistic analysis of the data focused on the numbers of errors in the light of how many words that each subject produced in his/her essay, and the reason for these errors. In addition, both the cognitive and cultural aspects of the subjects' written productions were examined and analyzed. Based on such analyses, recommendations were made.Keywords: Narrative writing, Cognitive and cultural aspects of writing, Contrastive analysis Background and Statement of the ProblemRecent attention to communicative competence, with its emphasis on sociolinguistic factors of language use, has led to the erroneous impression that communication is an oral phenomenon. In other words, communicating in English has always been associated with students' ability to speak appropriately. For too long, therefore, proficiency in English has meant only oral proficiency. Consequently it has been considered quite appropriate to wait a fairly long time before the initiation of writing composition instruction. A rationale for the delayed use of writing was grounded in principles of behavioral psychology and structural linguistics: written language was essentially a recording of speech, and a learner could code writing only through reference to the oral code which was previously and thoroughly mastered. As Terry (1989: 43) points out, 'of the four skills that are discussed and (supposedly) taught with equal emphasis in our foreign language classrooms, writing is perhaps the most poorly understood and the skill that is given, in fact, the most cursory attention'. Moreover, as early as 1970, some linguists and researchers tended to refer to communicative competence as a notion that is distinct from grammatical or linguistic competence. Omaggio (1986) maintains that for a period of years in the early to middle part of the decade, communicative competence became synonymous, in the minds of some researchers and practitioners, with a disregard for grammatical accuracy, and second language learners were considered communicatively competent if they got their meaning across to a listener, even if their grammatical accuracy was relatively low. Hence, the problem that teachers of English as a second language always encounter...
This study argues that if we, really, accept English as a global language, and diversity of cultures, we have to better understand the different composing conventions of different cultures; otherwise, written communication among people of different cultures may break down. This argument is theoretically based on a number of premises drawn from Purves's (1988) extensive research in contrastive rhetoric. With this in mind, the present study attempts to show how Arabic and Spanish speakers narrate in English and, to what extent their native cultures affect their narrative written productions. In addition, some of the cognitive factors that may shape the subjects' written productions were discussed. Using Laböv' sociolinguistic model of narrative structure, this study shows that the narrative texts of both Arabic and Spanish speakers share almost all the structural properties of Laböv's model. This finding may lead us to claim that regardless of the subjects' linguistic and cultural backgrounds, the narrative structural components seem to be somehow universal. This claim needs to be tested with low-level subjects of various languages and cultures.
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